Carnage Galore 3, now for GZDoom - beta (update)

[chopkinsca]

Bumping this because this crashes without fail in 3.6.0. From the start, go left and GZDoom crashes when you get to the room at the end of the tunnel.

I don't know about 3.6, but I just tried it in 3.7pre and it seemed to work fine.

I just checked, it's fixed. That means I can play it now

[Frozenwolf150]

I remember the first time I played this mod was way back in 2005, and it's good to see you working on it again. I just completed it with the Fighter on the highest difficulty.

Positives:

* I appreciate no longer having to buy your weapon 2. Being able to run over and grab it can be a lifesaver.
* Giving the Fighter more ranged options has turned him from the most vulnerable character to one of the most effective. He already has better speed, defense, and melee strength. The boss battle with the Blood Liches was pretty easy with all the seeking projectiles at my disposal. I also became fond of using the Hammer of Retribution's secondary fire to clear out a room without exposing myself to line of fire.
* The new weapons feel balanced, as do the alt-fire modes. I never felt forced to favor one particular weapon.
* The final difficulty setting kept me on my toes. Usually Hexen monsters are just dumb and slow, and far too easy to run circles around, but here I had to plan ahead for every battle.
* The secrets were the right balance of challenging and rewarding, and none were impossible to figure out.
* The new items are powerful and quite useful. The Potions of Freezing saw a lot of use when I knew an ambush was coming, so I could rig up the room and watch all the enemies teleport in and instantly die. I never used too many Foetid Flasks due to the abundance of existing pods, but those were fun to push around and climb on, as well as blockade doorways to blow up enemies.
* The GZDoom effects are used quite well, and the maps look a lot better than the JHexen version.
* I was glad to find out the scripting errors in earlier versions, that prevented doors from opening after events, were fixed. (I can't remember if it was the GZDoom or JHexen version though.)


Negatives:

* The fog is overdone in some maps, making it impossible to see distant enemies who can still snipe at you with perfect accuracy. I had to disable the fog effects in those particular areas. The worst is in the Undercroft tunnels area where it's already very dark and has pitfalls.
* The Malison curse aura doesn't appear over bosses like with normal enemies, even though it's supposed to affect them. I just assumed it wasn't working.
* I wish there were some way to sell unneeded items, and carry more than just 25 bronze coins at once. I would have liked to trade in some of my other artifacts for, say, a Tome of Power.


Other Comments:

* I still find myself wishing there were some kind of RPG progression system, like in Scattered Evil or Serpent Resurrection. Ever since the Kmod and Wrath of Cronos, I've gotten used to thinking of Hexen as an RPG.
* I found a way to make the boss battle against D'Sparil way easier than it should be, though I assumed this was an intended feature.


Looking forward to seeing Chapter 3. I admit I still feel disappointed to be dumped into Heresiarch's Seminary after beating Chapter 2. I haven't tried out the Cleric or Mage yet, so I'll probably do that next.

[Ichor]

* The fog is overdone in some maps, making it impossible to see distant enemies who can still snipe at you with perfect accuracy. I had to disable the fog effects in those particular areas. The worst is in the Undercroft tunnels area where it's already very dark and has pitfalls.
* The Malison curse aura doesn't appear over bosses like with normal enemies, even though it's supposed to affect them. I just assumed it wasn't working.
* I wish there were some way to sell unneeded items, and carry more than just 25 bronze coins at once. I would have liked to trade in some of my other artifacts for, say, a Tome of Power.

1. Alright, the fog in most maps were toned down. I forgot I could change the density of the fog besides just changing the lighting. Maps 7 and 9 uses the basic Darkmere type fog, so I didn't change that.

2. I changed it recently so that it no longer affects bosses.

3. I have considered increasing the max coin carrying amount to 40-50, but I never got around to it yet (at least until now).

4. A good thing to try is put down a pod and then set a potion of freezing near it. When something walks into the potion, it detonates the pod as well, causing even more damage.

[Ichor]

I think now is the time for a new update. The third hub is moving along a bit faster now that I'm done with the citadel. The library is the map I'm working on now, and the main building won't be nearly as large, meaning it shouldn't take quite as long to finish it. After that, there are three more maps to make. Anyway, on to the fixes and changes:

• Removed the hidden flag from most secret areas
• Reduced the fog density in most maps.
• Added some fog to the exit in map 8 leading to 10 for the sake of consistency.
• Increased the speed of a few weapon projectiles, like the crossbow bolts, iron balls, iron rippers (and increased the ripping damage a bit to compensate), and bone shards.
• Fixed a couple of glitches with the stained windows in map 9.
• The iron ward alt-fire now defaults to one shot at a time instead of two. Rapid fire is unchanged.
• The sapphire wand no longer uses mana for its primary fire (powered and unpowered). As a result, the damage is reduced. Alt-fire is unchanged, though the shots themselves are a little larger.
• The cleric crossbow can now be used even when out of blue mana. It will shoot 3 unpowered arrows for every firing mode you use until you collect more blue mana.
• The torch now causes much less slowdown.
• Fixed some glitches with selecting and firing weapons when almost out of mana.
• Fixed some level text (solved puzzles, etc.) not appearing in the console.
• Gargoyles, except the ice gargoyle, can now be frozen if they are at ground level.
• Monsters will no longer be able to hang around right behind the emerald gate.
• The flame centaur was renamed to the brutaur.
• Increased maximum carry amount of all coins and malison scroll to 40
• Removed excess SCRIPTS entries in the wad. Some of them went back to over a decade ago.
• Added a secret where you can get the second third slot weapon (i.e. dragon claw) earlier, and a book with a hint about it.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/4kj72d0yosmwrv3/cg3_ch2.pk3?dl=0

[Ichor]

Quick update:

• GZDoom 3.8 was causing the hub 2 sky to turn black. That's been fixed (this was the main reason for the update).
• Fixed a badly misaligned texture in map 5.
• Made the black areas in map 8 brighter.

Same link as before

[Graf Zahl]

Quick update:
GZDoom 3.8 was causing the hub 2 sky to turn black. That's been fixed (this was the main reason for the update).

Out of curiosity, what was the reason for that?

[Ichor]

Quick update:
GZDoom 3.8 was causing the hub 2 sky to turn black. That's been fixed (this was the main reason for the update).

Out of curiosity, what was the reason for that?

When I updated to GZDoom 3.8, the SKY1 sky (the icy mountains) suddenly started blocking the fog sky and turned it black except for the zenith. At first, I thought it was a GZDoom bug, but it was really on my end. All other double skies worked, even those in my maps here, so the problem had to be that one sky. That was an old sky that wasn't translucent. I don't know why it even worked until now, but after making it a png and removing the black area, it works now, even in older versions.

[Graf Zahl]

Hexen defines all skies like that - it alone shouldn't prevent it from working. There was a change, though, how this texture hack was handled, did you by any chance apply a translation through TEXTURES to it?

[Ichor]

Not sure. The sky was the only one that wasn't a translucent png. Instead it was an old style bmp that was left over from the days when I used Wintex. When I switched this over from JHexen years ago, that sky wouldn't work properly as a png (maybe I didn't add the translucency properly, who knows?), so I left it as a bmp. It worked fine until 3.8.

[Gez]

When you say bmp, you mean Doom's native picture format, right? ZDoom never supported BMP format.

[Graf Zahl]

Possibly. Do you still have a download with this thing? I'd like to check to see if it is something that needs addressing.

[Ichor]

I just happened to still have a older copy from a couple of weeks ago.

[Graf Zahl]

Thanks. I'd rather want to ensure that this isn't a bug that might affect other mods as well.

[Jimmy]

I've been meaning to try this out for literally years and only just now have gotten round to it, feel like a bit of a ninny for not getting to it sooner. I think I may have actually tried out the JHexen version of this many many moons ago, but never finished it. These days I'm aching to see what new content for Heretic or Hexen is being put out so I figured I'd better check this out, as it's certainly been around long enough.

I'm playing through right now, and I will hopefully be commenting on the full thing once I've beaten it! No idea how long that's going to take me (there's... 13 maps, looks like? with presumably more to come - judging by the output of "listmaps", anyway), but I'm loving what I've seen so far, and I'm barely three maps in.

Everything "feels" pretty good so far, which honestly is a pretty crucial component to the experience. Vanilla Heretic and Hexen can have the tendency to drag and feel clunky and slow, but here even the old weapons just feel good and satisfying to use, and the gameplay goes by pretty quickly and fluidly - even the more puzzly sections like the library in the first map (which is really just hunting for a couple of specific bookshelf textures, heh). What I've seen of the new content so far is also really neat.

I'm excited to see more.

[ShadesMaster]

Kinda a shot in the dark, since I know it's your solo project and all - but if u ever need an additional mapper, I can churn up something cool or two.